Review of Ancient Aliens S15E05 "The Mystery of the Stone Giants"

In New York harbor, a giant copper statue of a woman stands on an island. No one alive today witnessed the construction of the statue, and the beliefs and ideology standing behind its erection are hazy memories, openly mocked by members of the United States government who are the successors of those who put it up. If Ancient Aliens were to be believed, this is proof that America had been colonized by giant women from space, for how else can we explain the presence of such a pointlessly large depiction of a woman wearing a “helmet” shooting “space lasers” from it, or covered in “antennas”? That’s about the depth and quality of this episode. Given the title, though, I would have expected the show to be a little broader in its look at stone statues, since they exist all over the world. We really get only a very narrow focus on Mesoamerica and Easter Island, which serves to make the show less effective than it might have been if anyone had given a shit about their topic.

“The Mystery of the Stone Giants” is premised on an exploration of large stone statues. The first set of statues are the four colossi of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel from the 1200s BCE. William Henry alleges that the statues within the temple, which are illuminated twice a year, absorb energy for some “technological” purpose. The do not, since they are solid rock and contain no moving parts. Immediately, the show compares this to Easter Island, Copan, and Göbelki Tepe, where the representational nature of statues as images of ancestors and gods is transformed into a claim that they were literally godlike in a material sense—that they have superpowers. Jeff Williams, a social media hustler who sells tips to “find gold fast,” shows up to claim that rocks vibrate with mystical energy. He bizarrely alleges that rocks are not “inanimate” because they contain many types of “minerals.” That doesn’t make any sense even by Ancient Aliens standards, but he then blathers about how cellphone EMF is dangerous but that rocks give out as much energy as a cellphone. He seems a bit confused about the difference between being a conductor and being a generator of electricity.
 
All of this, of course, returns to the familiar refrain of Ancient Aliens that the piezoelectric effect found in granite and quartz is somehow mystically important. In the past, they alleged that the granite of obelisks and statues would shoot power to satellites in the sky, but now they allege that because quartz crystals can be used to store data, therefore natural rocks such as granite are actually “5D quartz technology” storing antediluvian alien information. It should, I hope, go without saying that a small manufactured quartz glass storage drive is not the same as a naturally formed crystal or the fragments of quartz embedded in granite. Andrew Collins is very excited that such quartz memory drives could store data “forever,” though I’m sure that a hammer could destroy a civilization’s worth of data in a few seconds.
 
After the break, the show travels to Mexico and Central America to discuss the magnetic fields found in some stone statues, including the Olmec heads.  Archaeologists reported on the magnetism of the Monte Alban statues last year, which is undoubtedly why they refer to those statues here. David Childress calls the ancient peoples of Mexico and Central America “primitive,” and the show asserts that the ancient Americans’ interest in magnetism isn’t just native scientific discovery but rather was “instructions” from “alien visitors,” though they offer not a lick of evidence for the claim. Other cultures discovered magnetism, but the Greeks and Chinese somehow escape the taint of aliens intervention to teach them about magnets. They assert that the Olmec stone heads “were intended to be used for data storage,” though they do not explain how a naturally formed solid rock functions for data storage. Futurist and entrepreneur Nova Spivack tries, though, by alleging, vaguely, that “nanotechnology” encoded data into the stones. How, exactly, does he get people to invest with him or sell him their businesses, given that he seems to be a complete looney tune fantasizing about space aliens?
 
Next up, the show visits the Maya city of Copan in Honduras, repeating the allegation that the Maya “vanished,” though they are still living in the same area today. Giorgio Tsoukalos visits Copan with archaeologist David Sedat, who seems very excited about prostituting his own research and Maya culture to the ancient astronaut theory. Tsoukalos interprets every headdress and helmet on the carvings there as space helmets, though they have no glass visors—kind of important for a space helmet to be of any use. Helmets, of course, tend to look the same on the strength of the fact that they have to cover heads that are of the same shape.
 
Tsoukalos summarizes the ancient astronaut theory for Sedat and then tells Sedat that Mesopotamian gods wore the “exact same or similar” headdresses to those of the Maya gods. Sedat is seen to nod in agreement and then claim that the Maya statues were “memory chip banks” full of crystals that vibrate data. If that were the case, the broken stele should have revealed these memory chips, and yet they are not there. Sedat, however, doesn’t mean what Tsoukalos means. He seems to be under the impression that crystal retain impressions of the past and could be “unlocked” to release the impressions formed during the carving process. This is also nutty, but New Age dingbat ideas are not the same as asserting that the statues were computer chips.  
 
In the next segment, Sedat claims that stele are “supernatural personas” that can “travel through time” two million years in each direction. He seems to be speaking symbolically of the Maya rulers’ boasts to have witnessed astronomical phenomena in the deep past and far future through their “eternal” statues, but Tsoukalos takes the poorly worded claim literally, and imagines them a time machine.
 
As we move on, we look at the Toltec Atlantean statues at Tula (a conventional name, not actually from Atlantis), and Tsoukalos asserts that their warrior armor is in fact space-walking equipment. I’m certain spacesuits had at least 50% fewer feathers. Childress asserts that the moai of Easter Island could “influence” people by beaming out “energy” at them. He then returns to the longstanding Ancient Aliens claim, derived from twentieth century ley lines nonsense via Ivan T. Sanderson’s speculative fantasies, that there is a world energy grid where ancient sites stand.
 
Finally, as this weirdly rambling, unfocused show rolls downhill to a landing, it asserts that granite statues are “portals” that can open doors to other dimensions. It ought to be clear enough that this isn’t the case, since they have opened no doors to any living witness, but I suppose that explains what happens when you lose your keys: The granite countertops in your kitchen have sucked them into the Twilight Zone. It seems, though, that Childress understands that these claims are refuted by the simple fact of the portals’ nonexistence, so he offers the even more ridiculous idea that they only function when the complete “world system” of stone statues is in place and complete. That might have made sense except that the statues the show sites were erected between 10,000 BCE and c. 1200 CE, meaning that there was literally no time in human history when all of those statues were standing and ejaculating their phallic ancient astronaut energy loads the same time. So, either the system never worked, or the statues don’t work together, or Ancient Aliens and its friends made the whole thing up.